Goldman's New No Work After Midnight Policy

Years ago, back when I worked as a freelancer, there was this bar in Lower Manhattan that I frequented due to its notoriously good Sunday night happy hour, which actually began on Monday morning, that is, it began at the stroke of midnight—at 12 a.m. As I recall, this bar would be nearly empty on Sundays until about 11:56 p.m., at which point the place would begin to fill up and, by 12:03 a.m., there wouldn’t be an open seat in sight.

I mention this not to impress you with the perks of a freelancer (of which there weren’t as many as you might think) but only because if the aforementioned bar is still in operation, it would probably be a great place for new Goldman Sachs summer interns to know about. Reason is, thanks to a new Goldman policy, the bank’s interns are now forbidden from working between the hours of midnight and 7 a.m.

The move, which might surprise those who aren’t familiar with intern hours on Wall Street (yes, even summer analysts have been known to pull all-nighters), follows a policy that Goldman enacted a couple years ago that forbids its full-time analysts from working on Saturdays. It also follows the apparent suicides of two Wall Street bankers—one who worked for Goldman, the other for Moelis & Company—whose brutal work schedules may have had more than a little to do with their deaths.

Goldman’s so-called Protected-Saturday policy, which has been copied by numerous other Wall Street firms, was itself enacted in the wake of a Bank of America summer intern dying after reportedly working three all-nighters in a row (the official cause of his death was epilepsy).

And so, since Goldman tends to run ahead of the Wall Street pack, both when it comes to profits and to workplace policies, chances are good that you will see other investment banks implementing similar moves, giving their interns more time to sleep this summer and/or party it up downtown.

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